[SAN FRANCISCO] Amazon Web Services’ top executive admonished staff on Thursday for what he called slow product rollouts by the cloud computing provider at its premier Reinvent customer event in December, according to a transcript of a meeting reviewed by Reuters.
The Amazon unit typically announces its most ambitious new products and services at the annual conference in Las Vegas. Last year, for instance, AWS showed off its Nova chatbot, pitting it against OpenAI and other artificial intelligence rivals.
“Increasingly, we’re finding that when we launch innovative new things at Reinvent it’s valuable if we can actually launch them, as opposed to just pre-announce them,” Matt Garman said at an internal all-hands meeting.
“Customers want to be able to use our products when we talk about them, and we find that when we’re slow and coming out with products, you lose some of that buzz.” It was unclear which products Garman was referencing.
“Reuters is grossly misinterpreting a second hand account of what was an inspiring internal conversation where we encouraged the team to work hard to keep delivering meaningful value to customers at Reinvent, just as we do every year,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement.
Amazon has been grappling with a reputation for slipping behind rivals in developing AI products.
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On its most recent earnings call, a Morgan Stanley analyst asked Amazon CEO Andy Jassy about what he said was a narrative on Wall Street that “AWS is falling behind in genAI with concerns about share loss to peers.”
Jassy defended the company in an unusual eight-minute rebuttal, saying AI was in the early stages of development and there will be multiple winners.
Still, Garman pressed his staff on Thursday. “The first and very most important thing we’ve got to do is make sure that we deliver on the roadmap that we have,” he said.
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Garman also pushed staff to ensure that AWS customers attend Reinvent in person, saying the Dec 1-5 conference is “not interesting if customers aren’t there.” The goal is to have over 60,000 attendees, said Garman, which would roughly match last year’s total.
At the meeting, Garman demonstrated a new product for internal testing called Quick, a type of AI known as “agentic,” meaning it will perform tasks with minimal or no additional prompting.
It can analyse a variety of documents and web pages to improve productivity, he said. “You can actually build customised workflows for things that you do on a regular basis that you can automate.”
Quick will be available to all AWS employees to test soon, he said. REUTERS
